Modern Mythology - Andrew Lang 2 стр.

To all this a reply is urged in the following pages. In agreement with Curtius and many other scholars, we very sincerely doubt almost all etymologies of old proper names, even in Greek or Sanskrit. We find among philologists, as a rule, the widest discrepancies of interpretation. Moreover, every name must mean something. Now, whatever the meaning of a name (supposing it to be really ascertained), very little ingenuity is needed to make it indicate one or other aspect of Dawn or Night, of Lightning or Storm, just as the philologist pleases. Then he explains the divine or heroic being denoted by the name as Dawn or Storm, or Fire or Night, or Twilight or Wind in accordance with his private taste, easily accommodating the facts of the myth, whatever they may be, to his favourite solution. We rebel against this kind of logic, and persist in studying the myth in itself and in comparison with analogous myths in every accessible language. Certainly, if divine and heroic names Artemis or Pundjel can be interpreted, so much is gained. But the myth may be older than the name.

As Mr. Hogarth points out, Alexander has inherited in the remote East the myths of early legendary heroes. We cannot explain these by the analysis of the name of Alexander! Even if the heroic or divine name can be shown to be the original one (which is practically impossible), the meaning of the name helps us little. That Zeus means sky cannot conceivably explain scores of details in the very composite legend of Zeus say, the story of Zeus, Demeter, and the Ram. Moreover, we decline to admit that, if a divine name means swift, its bearer must be the wind or the sunlight. Nor, if the name means white, is it necessarily a synonym of Dawn, or of Lightning, or of Clear Air, or what not. But a mythologist who makes language and names the fountain of myth will go on insisting that myths can only be studied by people who know the language in which they are told. Mythologists who believe that human nature is the source of myths will go on comparing all myths that are accessible in translations by competent collectors.

Mr. Max Müller says, We seldom find mythology, as it were, insitu as it lived in the minds and unrestrained utterances of the people. We generally have to study it in the works of mythographers, or in the poems of later generations, when it had long ceased to be living and intelligible. The myths of Greece and Rome, in Hyginus or Ovid, are likely to be as misleading as a hortussiccus would be to a botanist if debarred from his rambles through meadows and hedges. 3

Nothing can be more true, or more admirably stated. These remarks are, indeed, the charter, so to speak, of anthropological mythology and of folklore. The old mythologists worked at a hortussiccus, at myths dried and pressed in thoroughly literary books, Greek and Latin. But we now study myths in the unrestrained utterances of the people, either of savage tribes or of the European Folk, the unprogressive peasant class. The former, and to some extent the latter, still live in the mythopœic state of mind regarding bees, for instance, as persons who must be told of a death in the family. Their myths are still not wholly out of concord with their habitual view of a world in which an old woman may become a hare. As soon as learned Jesuits like Père Lafitau began to understand their savage flocks, they said, These men are living in Ovids Metamorphoses. They found mythology insitu! Hence mythologists now study mythology insitu in savages and in peasants, who till very recently were still in the mythopœic stage of thought. Mannhardt made this idea his basis. Mr. Max Müller says, 4 very naturally, that I have been popularising the often difficult and complicated labours of Mannhardt and others. In fact (as is said later), I published all my general conclusions before I had read Mannhardt. Quite independently I could not help seeing that among savages and peasants we had mythology, not in a literary hortussiccus, but insitu. Mannhardt, though he appreciated Dr. Tylor, had made, I think, but few original researches among savage myths and customs. His province was European folklore. What he missed will be indicated in the chapter on The Fire-Walk one example among many.

But this kind of mythology insitu, in the unrestrained utterances of the people, Mr. Max Müller tells us, is no province of his. I saw it was hopeless for me to gain a knowledge at first hand of innumerable local legends and customs; and it is to be supposed that he distrusted knowledge acquired by collectors: Grimm, Mannhardt, Campbell of Islay, and an army of others. A scholarlike knowledge of Maori or Hottentot mythology was also beyond him. We, on the contrary, take our Maori lore from a host of collectors: Taylor, White, Manning (The Pakeha Maori), Tregear, Polack, and many others. From them we flatter ourselves that we get as from Grimm, Mannhardt, Islay, and the rest mythology insitu. We compare it with the dry mythologic blossoms of the classical hortussiccus, and with Greek ritual and temple legend, and with Märchen in the scholiasts, and we think the comparisons very illuminating. They have thrown new light on Greek mythology, ritual, mysteries, and religion. This much we think we have already done, though we do not know Maori, and though each of us can hope to gather but few facts from the mouths of living peasants.

Examples of the results of our method will be found in the following pages. Thus, if the myth of the fire-stealer in Greece is explained by misunderstood Greek or Sanskrit words in no way connected with robbery, we shall show that the myth of the theft of fire occurs where no Greek or Sanskrit words were ever spoken. There, we shall show, the myth arose from simple inevitable human ideas. We shall therefore doubt whether in Greece a common human myth had a singular cause in a disease of language.

It is with no enthusiasm that I take the opportunity of Mr. Max Müllers reply to me by name. Since Myth, Ritual, andReligion (now out of print, but accessible in the French of M. Marillier) was published, ten years ago, I have left mythology alone. The general method there adopted has been applied in a much more erudite work by Mr. Frazer, TheGoldenBough, by Mr. Farnell in CultsoftheGreekStates, by Mr. Jevons in his IntroductiontotheHistoryofReligion, by Miss Harrison in explanations of Greek ritual, by Mr. Hartland in TheLegendofPerseus, and doubtless by many other writers. How much they excel me in erudition may be seen by comparing Mr. Farnells passage on the Bear Artemis 5 with the section on her in this volume.

Mr. Max Müller observes that Mannhardts mythological researches have never been fashionable. They are now very much in fashion; they greatly inspire Mr. Frazer and Mr. Farnell. They seemed to me, and still seem to me, too exclusive, says Mr. Max Müller. 6 Mannhardt in his second period was indeed chiefly concerned with myths connected, as he held, with agriculture and with tree-worship. Mr. Max Müller, too, has been thought exclusive as teaching, he complains, that the whole of mythology is solar. That reproach arose, he says, because some of my earliest contributions to comparative mythology were devoted exclusively to the special subject of solar myths. 7 But Mr. Max Müller also mentions his own complaints, of the omnipresent sun and the inevitable dawn appearing in ever so many disguises.

Mr. Max Müller observes that Mannhardts mythological researches have never been fashionable. They are now very much in fashion; they greatly inspire Mr. Frazer and Mr. Farnell. They seemed to me, and still seem to me, too exclusive, says Mr. Max Müller. 6 Mannhardt in his second period was indeed chiefly concerned with myths connected, as he held, with agriculture and with tree-worship. Mr. Max Müller, too, has been thought exclusive as teaching, he complains, that the whole of mythology is solar. That reproach arose, he says, because some of my earliest contributions to comparative mythology were devoted exclusively to the special subject of solar myths. 7 But Mr. Max Müller also mentions his own complaints, of the omnipresent sun and the inevitable dawn appearing in ever so many disguises.

Did they really appear? Were the myths, say the myths of Daphne, really solar? That is precisely what we hesitate to accept. In the same way Mannhardts preoccupation with vegetable myths has tended, I think, to make many of his followers ascribe vegetable origins to myths and gods, where the real origin is perhaps for ever lost. The corn-spirit starts up in most unexpected places. Mr. Frazer, Mannhardts disciple, is very severe on solar theories of Osiris, and connects that god with the corn-spirit. But Mannhardt did not go so far. Mannhardt thought that the myth of Osiris was solar. To my thinking, these resolutions of myths into this or that original source solar, nocturnal, vegetable, or what not are often very perilous. A myth so extremely composite as that of Osiris must be a stream flowing from many springs, and, as in the case of certain rivers, it is difficult or impossible to say which is the real fountain-head.

One would respectfully recommend to young mythologists great reserve in their hypotheses of origins. All this, of course, is the familiar thought of writers like Mr. Frazer and Mr. Farnell, but a tendency to seek for exclusively vegetable origins of gods is to be observed in some of the most recent speculations. I well know that I myself am apt to press a theory of totems too far, and in the following pages I suggest reserves, limitations, and alternative hypotheses. Ilyaserpentetserpent; a snake tribe may be a local tribe named from the Snake River, not a totem kindred. The history of mythology is the history of rash, premature, and exclusive theories. We are only beginning to learn caution. Even the prevalent anthropological theory of the ghost-origin of religion might, I think, be advanced with caution (as Mr. Jevons argues on other grounds) till we know a little more about ghosts and a great deal more about psychology. We are too apt to argue as if the psychical condition of the earliest men were exactly like our own; while we are just beginning to learn, from Prof. William James, that about even our own psychical condition we are only now realising our exhaustive ignorance. How often we men have thought certain problems settled for good! How often we have been compelled humbly to return to our studies! Philological comparative mythology seemed securely seated for a generation. Her throne is tottering:

But we need not hate each other for the sake of our little systems, like the grammarian who damned his rivals soul for his theory of the irregular verbs. Nothing, I hope, is said here inconsistent with the highest esteem for Mr. Max Müllers vast erudition, his enviable style, his unequalled contributions to scholarship, and his awakening of that interest in mythological science without which his adversaries would probably never have existed.

Most of Chapter XII. appeared in the Contemporary Review, and most of Chapter XIII. in the Princeton Review.

REGENT MYTHOLOGY

Between 1860 and 1880, roughly speaking, English people interested in early myths and religions found the mythological theories of Professor Max Müller in possession of the field. These brilliant and attractive theories, taking them in the widest sense, were not, of course, peculiar to the Right Hon. Professor. In France, in Germany, in America, in Italy, many scholars agreed in his opinion that the science of language is the most potent spell for opening the secret chamber of mythology. But while these scholars worked on the same general principle as Mr. Max Müller, while they subjected the names of mythical beings Zeus, Helen, Achilles, Athênê to philological analysis, and then explained the stories of gods and heroes by their interpretations of the meanings of their names, they arrived at all sorts of discordant results. Where Mr. Max Müller found a myth of the Sun or of the Dawn, these scholars were apt to see a myth of the wind, of the lightning, of the thunder-cloud, of the crépuscule, of the upper air, of what each of them pleased. But these ideas the ideas of Kuhn, Welcker, Curtius (when he appeared in the discussion), of Schwartz, of Lauer, of Bréal, of many others were very little known if known at all to the English public. Captivated by the graces of Mr. Max Müllers manner, and by a style so pellucid that it accredited a logic perhaps not so clear, the public hardly knew of the divisions in the philological camp. They were unaware that, as Mannhardt says, the philological school had won few sure gains, and had discredited their method by a muster-roll of variegated and discrepant hypotheses.

Now, in all sciences there are differences of opinion about details. In comparative mythology there was, with rare exceptions, no agreement at all about results beyond this point; Greek and Sanskrit, German and Slavonic myths were, in the immense majority of instances, to be regarded as mirror-pictures on earth, of celestial and meteorological phenomena. Thus even the story of the Earth Goddess, the Harvest Goddess, Demeter, was usually explained as a reflection in myth of one or another celestial phenomenon dawn, storm-cloud, or something else according to taste.

Again, Greek or German myths were usually to be interpreted by comparison with myths in the Rig Veda. Their origin was to be ascertained by discovering the Aryan root and original significance of the names of gods and heroes, such as Saranyu Erinnys, Daphne Dahanâ, Athene Ahanâ. The etymology and meaning of such names being ascertained, the origin and sense of the myths in which the names occur should be clear.

Clear it was not. There were, in most cases, as many opinions as to the etymology and meaning of each name and myth, as there were philologists engaged in the study. Mannhardt, who began, in 1858, as a member of the philological school, in his last public utterance (1877) described the method and results, including his own work of 1858, as mainly failures.

But, long ere that, the English cultivated public had, most naturally, accepted Mr. Max Müller as the representative of the school which then held the field in comparative mythology. His German and other foreign brethren, with their discrepant results, were only known to the general, in England (I am not speaking of English scholars), by the references to them in the Oxford professors own works. His theories were made part of the education of children, and found their way into a kind of popular primers.

For these reasons, anyone in England who was daring enough to doubt, or to deny, the validity of the philological system of mythology in general was obliged to choose Mr. Max Müller as his adversary. He must strike, as it were, the shield of no Hospitaler of unsteady seat, but that of the Templar himself. And this is the cause of what seems to puzzle Mr. Max Müller, namely the attacks on his system and his results in particular. An English critic, writing for English readers, had to do with the scholar who chiefly represented the philological school of mythology in the eyes of England.